"Charity evaluator GiveWell published a review of charity: water in December 2012. Their overall conclusion was that charity: water "stands out from other organizations we have considered in some respects (such as conducting evaluations that include frank discussions of problems), but we remain uncertain about the humanitarian impact of their work and the relative effectiveness of their partner selection process."
http://www.givewell.org/international/charities/charity-wate...
Reading through this review it seems like this is a problem that extends far beyond their website. I would urge everyone to read the review before promoting this charity any further.
Full 4 star rating Financial: 66.22 / 70 Accountability & Transparent: 70/70 Overall Rating: 67.3 / 70
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...
Summary: giving should be easy. Nowadays I'm not very likely to give money (or even purchase stuff) if I can't do it via PayPal.
It's very well done, but it's just a slide show.
It's a good presentation, but it has very little to do with UX if the only user interactivity involved is clicking a button to go forward.
EDIT: The title of this story has been changed since I and others made this and similar comments. The previous title said something to the effect of "Story Telling: Some of the best UX I've seen."
If you are instead trying to spread the word about this in an indirect manner, I understand, smooth move.
Thanks for the feedback, hopefully we'll be able to improve the site. It's an awesome cause, and I'd love to see this raise money and awareness for them.
Here's a bit of background info:
We made the site, because we've been supporters of charity:water for years. They have a wonderful story, and are a top notch non-profit (they give 100% of donations to the cause...even going so far as to reimburse credit card fees).
One challenge they face is finding ways to scale. The vast majority of donations come in through the web, but those are from supporters they create in offline events. We wanted to find a way to grow their base of supporters, by telling their story simply and elegantly (that's the plan at least). Put more simply, we wanted to "make charity go viral". They have raised over $95M in the past 5 years, but they are trying to tackle a $1B problem here, so we did our best to scale their efforts. We normally work on for-profit ventures (www.monkeyinferno.com), so this was a unique challenge.
Attempt #1 took a year, and ultimately failed. (too complicated, viral coefficient = 0.7)
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/michael-birchs-waterforward...
Attempt #2 is the product you see now at waterforward.org
30+ iterations in 30 days, trying to make this slide-show story concept work. We just went viral overseas (4M shares so far), but unfortunately haven't raised a ton of money. Biggest problem is that we are super viral in India, but can't process Indian Rupees.
Anyway - thanks for the constructive feedback. We'll work out some of the UX issues over time, but for now, we appreciate the general support.
-Shaan @shaanvp
The total foreign aid per year is more than $100 billion, so using effective foreign aid access to water could be solved easily. Unfortunately, foreign aid is extremely inefficient.
What if instead of asking me to send a form email to my friends it had a phone based call to action? All manual, but wouldn't it be cool if it showed a short video of someone calling a friend and just explaining it?
"Write down 5 of your friends' names on a piece of paper or in a text editor and one-by-one give them a ring and tell them about this."
Not sure if that would annoy some people even more, it just seems like email is the easiest thing ever to disregard.
A valid, working email address is very valuable to fundraisers, because they can then hit you up directly in future for additional donations. Can't do that if you tell people to go offline and call their friends.
This also answers the question elsewhere in this thread of "why not ask people to share it via Facebook/Twitter instead of email?" In those cases there's an intermediary (Facebook/Twitter) who can stop your marketing messages. So your email address is more valuable to them than, say, your Twitter handle.
